Empire of the Primrose poem The city fell in a single night. Holding it would take longer. So the painters were summoned, and the saints on the walls were given his family's eyes. A bloodline was found for him, older than the walls, older than the kings who raised them. Now even the earth must forget it ever belonged to anyone else. The Empire of the Primrose - Station 1 Do you have recurring dreams? Travel Sketches by metamodernist artist JJFBbennett The cycle always resets at dusk, like waking inside the cold architecture of an unyielding, repetitive dream. I walk the wet, cobbled veins of an ancient European city, passing beneath stone arches hung with heavy, lifeless flags, heraldry drained of colour, damp cloth clinging to wooden poles like dead skin. There is no breath of wind, only the low, humming pressure of an era turning in its sleep. I reach into an iron sconce and tear loose a torch of roaring, ragged fire. The flame casts jittering amber shad...
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Student Distraction and Teaching
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I think dealing with distraction has been with humans for many centuries. It isn't something we have to bash up our youth with. They are not a diminished generation. I like Elvis even though he destroyed my parent's minds
How do we measure diminished concentration? Many people have an unintentional injury in the pre-Google world. In America (land of Google) from 2000 to 2009 unintentional death rates declined by 29%. There is enough research that demonstrates a rise in IQ occurred alongside the rise of the internet. (Google Scholar search: Internet and IQ increase).
I believe that Learning is actually a distraction (disruptive and distractive).
I have a keen interest in how mindsets which focus on narrow points disconnects us with what is actually happening in what is a rich multi-faceted complex reality. Knowing actually positions the person. It can lessen adaptability and change.
An open learning mindset distracts us from fixed knowing. Education is in the learning business, not the knowing business. Education is a distraction. In regards to open-mindsets and fixed mindsets, I refer to psychologist Carol Dweck.
What occurs in our fabricated personal paradigm is often a disillusioned place that we think we know until something or somebody (teacher, mentor, peer) helps us transform towards a new sense of understanding. Learning is the distraction we need to assist us from the position based fixed mind of knowing. Sometimes allowing yourself to be distracted from what you know is difficult.
Check out how easily these pre-Google educated people are so easily distracted.
I have not read any research that specifically states that learning has diminished because of students' diminished capacity to think and learn. I do not believe that students' have any less attention span than my generation or my parents' generation. Students are staying longer at school, unintentional accidents have declined and research points to an increase in IQ has occurred whilst the internet reaches mass saturation. The ability to read and understand, to think deeply and philosophically, and to develop intellectually has not diminished.
21st Century learning requires different teaching methodologies and tools than what was generally employed in the 20th century. OECD links the growth of a nation's economy with learning, technology, and innovation. Singapore is now top of the OECD PISA ranks. They employ a program 'Teach Less Learn More' and employ high levels of connected technology. Singapore has changed significantly since my youth. Future secondary school students need to have the skills to work in the Global Digital Economy: Digital Economy Skills (read more):
It is possible that if learning is based on consuming content, listening, observing, note-taking, and regurgitation (20th Century Industrial technology methods) distraction can increase. However, if learning which actively engaging students with their learning through 21st Century networks and social technology, learning effectiveness can increase.
Anne Matthew paper on Managing distraction in 21st-century learning environments, Nuts and Bolts' offers some insights into learning, inter-connectivity, rapid multitasking, and attention switching:
The challenges of maintaining attention and managing distraction are not new barriers to learning; the novelty in 21st-century learning environments is the plethora of technological distractions beyond the control of the teacher. The extent to which distraction impacts upon the learning experience may well be dependent upon a number of factors, including learning and teaching approaches and individual learning preferences. Where the learning experience hinges upon student attention through listening, observing, or note-taking, the impact of the distraction indicates a potential failure in pedagogy in the new learning environment. The challenge presented is how best to engage learners effectively. The answer may lie at the intersection of attention economics and accepted principles of effective learning and teaching practices directed at maximizing student engagement in active learning (Matthew, 2012). In information-rich, highly connected learning environments, the most effective learning, and teaching practices will be those that deploy and structure attention to the greatest effect by actively engaging students with their learning. It is suggested that in seeking the most appropriate pedagogy, the learner’s role in actively shaping their own learning experience should be supported and such support should extend to use of ‘technologies of their own choice where appropriate’ (JISC, 2009, p. 51)
Through the eyes of the Lost Soldier The sky is bleeding into the dirt again, and the old hunger crawls up through my boots. It no longer matters. Time does not march out here. It pools beneath a dry creek bed, stagnant and unseen. But when the moon swells, heavy and bruised with copper rust, the cold in my ribs becomes a scald. The scrub does not burn with heat. It burns with memory. Through the tangled mallee, I see the flash of artillery, the orange-red roar of a barrage that never stopped falling, trapped forever inside the rib cages of these dead gums. I taste copper on my tongue, sharp as rifle oil and dried blood. The black heavens press down, bending the whole world inward until I am trapped inside a glass bead of fire. I pace the boundary where red light cuts into deep shadow, waiting for a relief column that lost its heading eighty years ago. Everything here is parched. I am so thirsty. But I do not want water. I want your nourishment. I want your dawn, your warm pulse, as yo...
AI ART and Meaning What role does an artist play when employing AI? Artist statement by JJFBbennett If we accept that AI can generate vast quantities of statistically “meaningful” content from data and algorithms, then meaningful art may lie not in the output itself, but in its selection and framing. AI functions as a kind of unconscious, producing raw material at scale. The artist’s role shifts from maker to curator: deciding what to extract from the data’s noise, what to present as art, the context in which it appears, and the conversation it enters. The artist as the muddler and meddler in the centre of it all. This shift has an art-historical precedent. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp’s *Fountain* made a decisive claim: the artist had not sculpted the urinal but selected it, titled it, and placed it in a gallery. Meaning arose from the gesture of choice rather than the act of making. Walter Benjamin, too, anticipated this logic in his reflections on montage and editing: meaning can e...
Adelaide River to Daly Waters: through the windscreen Through the windscreen, the drive south from Adelaide River toward Daly Waters reveals the continent’s layered past, unfolding mile by mile. The journey is not merely a passage through space; rather, it is a confrontation with history itself, where the frontier’s rupture transforms the land into a living narrative of loss, power, and the slow, stubborn return of what was once taken. Once you cross that violent threshold, where modern roads carve through the repressed ghosts of the interior, you can never see the Australian outback the same way again. The bitumen transforms: no longer a mere ribbon of asphalt, but an audacious thread of technology stretched tenuously over ancient, dreaming ground. Southward, beyond the iron-stained ridges of Pine Creek and the sun-scorched Barkly plains , the story changes. Here, the land speaks of colonial bravado undone, of cultures and nations ground and reformed by force. Telegraph stat...
